Photo by Johann Dréo courtesy of Creative Commons
Camila Fernandez / Staff Writer
The 21st century has introduced a shift from desktop computers to a generation of hand-held users; but while people enjoy information at their fingertips, Wikipedia has reported that they haven’t adjusted to posting and editing through their mobile devices.
According to the online encyclopedia site, only 1 percent of changes to Wikipedia articles were made via mobile devices since July. In English, there were a mere 200,000 mobile edits compared to 20 million total edits.
For Wikipedia, the shift to mobile has lagged, raising a question: Will people continue to create and edit nine million existing articles on smartphones and tablets?
According to professor Shu-Ching Chen from the School of Computing and Information Sciences, using computers over smartphones and tablets depends on the professional level of the user.
“For the general people that don’t need to use computers to do very serious jobs every day, they can use a smartphone to check their email to do other stuff like browsing Facebook and the web,” Chen said.
He also said that for those in enterprises or companies, small devices are simply not convenient.
However, Chen pointed to a trend that more people are using the smaller devices while less are using computers. Thus, the sales of computers are being detracted as the growth of handheld devices grow at a faster rate.
“Desktops have more memory and computing speed has become much faster, but certainly a hand-held device can do much more stuff compared to five years ago,” Chen said. “Certainly this trend will continue.”
Iddet Milian-Prada, a junior French major, said it makes sense for Wikipedia to conform to the hand-held generation.
As a receptionist for seven years at a medical group practice, Milian-Prada has had to adjust from filing papers to using laptops, rather than tablets which do not provide enough data storage for the 500 patients she receives weekly.
“We’re using laptops that turn into tablets because we need a lot of storage and they don’t make tablets with a lot of storage right now,” Milian-Prada said “You need ten times that when you’re running a hospital or when you’re running an airport. You have to hold a lot of space and you can’t keep that in tablets right now, but maybe in the future.”
According to Shadeh Ferris-Francis, president of Women in Computer Science, there is a phenomenon that addresses hardware advancing technology.
Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on a chip will double approximately every two years. This means technology is expected to become more economical as it becomes smaller in size, faster in data-processing and more readily available for the use of a larger public.
“As hardware continues to advance in speed and storage capability and decreases in size and price, a lot of ideas that are currently considered ‘science-fiction’ may become very real,” Ferris-Francis said.
Despite of the overwhelming growth of smartphones and tablets, Chen said that you can still see students at the University carrying a laptop and using desktops for typing text that is much more extensive than a Twitter chat.
“Most people like the simple uses of the smartphone hand-held device,” Chen said. “You don’t need a GPS device because those phones can provide that. I see that those smart phone devices will depress some devices like that, but desktops will still be here.”
Maybe this would hold true for the online encyclopedia giant.
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